For Whom We Sing
by mer solitare
Summary: Remus celebrates Christmas in many ways.[1978-1993]


Christmas of seventy-eight is the first time Remus kisses Lily. They're both drunk, and she laughs when he misses her mouth, and accidentally spills her glass of beer. He laughs, too, and helps her clean up the mess, both stumbling slightly. James and Sirius find them later sprawled in a spare bedroom, laughing about something that happened three years before at a rambunctious house party.

"Lils, it's time we get going." James says, and Lily snorts back laughter but allows herself to be dragged out by her fiance. "Bye, Remus!" She calls over her shoulder, smiling just for him, too drunk to care whether her fiance notices. Sirius helps Remus to his feet and watches him with too-sharp eyes.

"Don't want to do that Moony. It'll only end in trouble."

"I know." Remus says quietly, and lets Sirius support him on the walk home. He wakes up the next morning and is sick all over the bedroom floor, but Sirius simply cleans it up and strokes his hair while he cries.

Christmas of seventy-nine goes down in wizarding history as the Christmas that Voldemort kills a group of Muggle-born Hogwarts students on the way home from school. It's in all the papers, complete with blurry pictures of sobbing parents and headlines that scream of the death of modern wizarding society.

Lily laughs when Remus shows her the papers over breakfast, her green eyes rimmed in black, and simply says, "That'll get the ministry's knickers all in a twist. Can't even protect the kids, the self righteous bastards."

Remus, weary beyond his nineteen years, says nothing when she starts to cry. He simply leans over to pull the paper from her hands, and rest his forehead against hers. For a few minutes neither say anything, simply listen to the clock tick in the kitchen.

"Hey," Lily says suddenly, wiping her eyes furiously. Her eyeliner smears hopelessly across her cheeks, and he can't help but smile at her. "I'm pregnant." She looks away when she says it, eyes blank with fear.

"Oh." he says, calmly folds the papers neatly. "Does James know?"

She turns to him slowly and draws her knees to her chest, looking like the scared first year he shared his chocolate frogs with on the Hogwarts Express. "Yes." She says, and her voice trembles. "He flipped. I thinks he's out with Sirius right now celebrating his invincible manhood."

"Congratulations." He says calmly, and is surprised at how detached he sounds. "That's a great Christmas gift."

--

Christmas of eighty, Harry is four months and twenty-five days old. He has his mother's eyes, and the Potter hair, for which Remus is grateful (better black than brown, better green than amber). He is a quiet child, all shining eyes and pale skin. Lily calls him the sun which she revolves around, sings him nonsense songs about innocent things; Remus, watching them, hates James with all the passion of the wolf buried inside him.

"Better the sun than the moon." She tells him, Christmas Eve, after James has fallen asleep, Harry against his shoulder. Peter and Sirius lie slumped on the floor, empty wineglasses beside them. Her smile doesn't quite meet her eyes, and he can smell fear and loneliness and longing on her, all twisted together with her scent. Her hands are cool, figers nimble across the scars on his face, her breath warm aginst his cheek. "You're tired of living without a sun, aren't you?"

"Yes." He says, simple as that, and follows her into her bedroom

Next morning, Remus wakes up hungover and cold in the living room of his flat, smelling of sex and hunger. He spends the morning huddled in his shower, scrubbing himself raw.

--

Christmas of eighty-one goes by in an alcohol flavored haze. It snows, and his hands go numb before Dumbledore finds him and takes him back to his too-empty flat.

"I'd like to keep Harry." he tells Dumbledore, careful not to slur the words. "Please." He adds, not caring if he sounds desperate, because James and Lily and Peter are dead and Sirius caused all of it and Harry is all he has left. He doesn't think he can really survive if he loses Harry too.

Dumbledore has shadowed eyes and frail skin, things Remus is sure he's never truly noticed before. "I'm sorry, Remus. He's better off where he is."

He howls when the Change takes him, desperate and so very alone, and doesn't even bother to resist the transformation.

Christmas of eighty-one, he wakes up bleeding, new gashes across his body, skin stretched tight over aching bones. He doesn't bandage the wounds; it is the only tribute he has for his dead.

--

Christmas of eighty-two finds him in America, screwing a girl named Maria. She has Lily's voice and Sirius' eyes, and robs him blind the next morning. He wakes to find his wallet gone, and laughs for the first time in a year.

Christmas of eighty-three, he has a regular job at a rundown school in Florida, teaching remedial Defense classes to retired Aurors. They call him Mr. Lupin, and he thinks of how his friends would laugh if they heard it without even crying.

Christmas's eighty-four to eighty-six he spends in South America, battling various dark creatures. He runs across a werewolf once, and kills it with a silver bullet to the neck, and wakes up screaming for days afterward.

Christmas of eighty-seven, he returns to England. Home is still the same, from the splintered stairs leading to the basement, to the rusted chains in the corner. He puts up the old Christmas tree, sneezing at the dust, and then sits by himself all night.

Christmas of eighty-eight, he finds an old box of schoolbooks in the attic. Their smell makes his nose itch and he handles them carefully, nimbly avoiding the silver gilt of their titles. He burns them in the fireplace in the livingroom, watches as the flames slowly devour his old life. The smell of burning parchment reminds him of November, and the way James and Lily had smelled, their bodies crushed in the wreckage of their home.

Christmas of eighty-nine he spends running in a wild forest, the moon round above him. He wakes up naked, with the taste of blood slick and metallic in his mouth. He finds an old rope in the barn near his home, but it frays when he kicks the chair out from underneath himself, dropping him on the ground with a thump. He breaks three ribs and screams every curse word he can think of, and loses his voice for an entire week.

Christmas of ninety, he gets a job as a tutor for a wealthy family in London. He teaches the children arithmetic and history and biology, and carefully saves his money. Things will get better; he only has to will it so. They give him a homemade placard with his name on it, and he nearly cries at the sheer joy of it.

Christmas of ninety-one he has a brief affair with a young girl from Manchester; her name is Amy and she's not much older than James and Lily were when they died. She wants to be a dancer, she tells him, hair blood red and voice light in the winter sunlight, standing on the stoop outside his flat. He leaves her after three weeks, sprawled in his bed. You would have been a great dancer, he writes in the goodbye letter, and wonders if he should feel guilty for what he has done. Obliviate works wonders in sticky situations.

Christmas of ninety-two, he quietly decides things will never improve. He buys a silver necklace in a shop near Picadilly Square, and snarls when the saleslady tries to giftwrap it. It's easy enough to melt it down and cast it into a silver bullet, though it manages to burn his palm through the glove he wears to protect himself. His hand shakes when he pulls the trigger; the bullet lodges itself below his collarbone and burns its way through it. He almost cries afterwards, at the hospital, as the emergency pyschian carefully bandanges the wound. Those were his only savings.

Christmas of ninety-three finds him back at Hogwarts, professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts. He wakes to find a small pile of presents at the foot of his bed, wrap sparkling in the early morning sun. The ghosts of his dead whisper in the rustling of wrapping paper as he unwraps his gifts and he listens without tears, without regret. He arrives in the Great Hall early, to find Harry slumped over a bowl of oatmeal, alone at the Gryffindor table.

"Happy Christmas, Professor Lupin." He calls, in James' voice. He has Lily's eyes and his own cheekbones, and smiles too wearily for a thirteen-year-old.

Remus smiles back, seeing only this boy who is the sum of all his and Lily's (and James' and Sirius' and Peter's) parts, and replies, "Happy Christmas."


End file.
